Patricia Arquette gave activists a gift horse and they promptly shot it in the face

Every few months or so progressives (the term of choice for high-maintenance liberals) launch a jihad on an unsuspecting ally for the crime of “not using their words properly,” and the focus shifts from real world problems to semantics and this, to put it politely, is why shit doesn’t get done.

Sunday night at the Oscars, Patricia Arquette made an impassioned — but frantic due to time constraints — appeal for equal pay and equal rights for women.

She said:

To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights! It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America!

However, if you are to believe certain activist factions whose hobbyhorse Arquette failed to ride, she destroyed everything they have ever worked for with her off-the-cuff comments backstage when she said:

One of those superior court justices said two years ago in a law speech at a university that we don’t have equal rights for women in America, and we don’t because when they wrote Constitution, they didn’t intend it for women. So the truth is even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface there are huge issues at play that really do affect women. It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for — to fight for us now!

What should have been a call to arms for everyone to get behind a very basic and simple human right became a very horrible terrible awful bad thing because Arquette failed to properly express herself using approved terminology with appended footnotes and peer-reviewed study citations.

And in a speech that is directly about equal pay, Arquette’s call for solidarity from “all the gay people and all the people of color” ignores the fact that the wage gap for women of color and LGBTQ women is much, much worse than it is for straight white cis women.

I won’t even get into the usage of “cis,” which is the “fetch” of gender studies chit-chat, but it is worth noting that Arquette called for wage equality for all women, and, to mangle in old expression: a rising wage tide raises all women’s boats, regardless of a more detailed taxonomy.

The daughter of slain Civil Rights activist Malcolm X told TMZ that she believes it is “ridiculous” that white people are not allowed to use the N-word.

“Do you listen to rap at all?” the TMZ reporter asked.

“I do,” Ilyasah Shabazz replied.

“Do you cringe when they drop the N-word?”

“I think it’s just ridiculous sometimes. I think it is. I think it’s a bit ridiculous,” she said.

“What do you think about white people singing along with the N-bombs?” the TMZ reporter asked.

“I mean, you know, I think if we’re going to — I don’t know that you can — if you’re gonna use it, then everybody should be able use it,” she replied. “So if you don’t like other people using it, then we shouldn’t use it.”

When asked if her father would have voted for Barack Obama, Shabazz said, “I would imagine so, he was a very strong candidate.”

She was, however, adamant that Americans do not sufficiently celebrate her father’s legacy — although she believed the young people now are more understanding of the sacrifices he made.

They are, she said, appreciative of “the fact that he was a very young man who sacrificed a lot, that he was killed at a very young age and in 12 short years [as a public figure] he gave a — he made a significant impact around the world when people weren’t even traveling.”

Ridiculous indeed, not because I am fond of the n-word. Actually I would prefer if no one used it because it is a foul and demeaning word.

Yet so many of the arguments on the left are about words rather than substance that it sometimes seems like the word wars are all about personal status and a game where one wins by being the most sensitive in the world. I attribute some of this to modern child rearing that treats children like precious little princes and princesses sheltered from the real world where kids get hurt playing and learn independence at an early age. The sheltered precious little darlings become adept at word games and one-ups-manship as tools for gaining status.

We have a generation of so called progressives secure in identity ghettos where group think is the rule and deviation from group think turns others in to something out of “Lord of the Flies.”

Identity Politics means putting your own groups goals before all others and refusing to work together with anyone else on a package that would benefit all.

At the start of the Second Wave of feminism black activists denounced the women’s movement as a distraction and black women announced they put the issues of the African American Community first. Many black activists denounced the LGBT movements as unworthy of making the claim that their movement was one of civil rights.

And so on and so on…

We have so called progressives who love getting down and dirty when it comes to going to war over fucking words but who refuse to lower themselves to work in party politics to get progressive Democrats elected.

In the words of Elvis Costello. “I used to be disgusted, now I’m just amused.

Weird contradiction, don’tcha think… Catching and punishing murderers and assailants generally means putting the evil bastards behind bars, hopefully for many years. Hate crimes laws tack additional years onto what should already be long sentences and in the case of murders put the death penalty on the table.

But then again I’ve never seen any charm or sanity come out of San Francisco. Even years ago I found the city to be an ugly brutal city that made life especially hard for trans-women. Great place to be a gay man, sucky place to be a woman who was unfortunate enough to have been born transsexual.

On Monday, February 2, Taja Gabrielle de Jesus was found stabbed to death in a stairwell in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. She’s one of seven transgender women, most of whom were of color, reported to be murdered in the US since the beginning of 2015.

Danielle Castro is Taja’s adoptive sister. “Every time I think of her, I keep imagining her fighting for her life, and I just keep getting this graphic image of what she went through, Castro says. “And I don’t want to remember her that way.”

Typical responses in horrible situations like this one include angry demands for the killer to be locked up. More police. Stronger hate crimes laws.

But activists like Castro believe that these are most certainly not the way the community will find real safety, noting that trans people face high rates of abuse by police and correctional officers, and are often turned away by gendered social service operators such as battered women’s shelters and drug rehab centers.

Castro was one of the dozens of trans women of color who staged a die-in at the San Francisco City Hall on February 10, as several hundred allies gathered nearby. Another was Janetta Johnson of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP). Her organization, operating on a shoestring budget of well under $100,000 per year as mainstream gay rights groups like the Human Rights Campaign monopolize funding for LGBTQ issues, is one of the few resources geared toward the thousands of currently and formerly incarcerated trans people around the country. “We’re kind of like a population of people who have been left behind,” she says.

Anger is part of what spurred 300 or so people to turn up at City Hall in the middle of a weekday to demand more attention around the extreme rates of violence against trans people, especially trans people of color (Murders of community members are so common that in several hundred cities around the world, Trans Day of Remembrance vigils are held to commemorate the many lives cut short each year). But the group calling itself Taja’s Coalition is fueling their rage into a call for a not-so-typical kind of justice: safe, affordable, accessible housing and reentry programs for trans people in San Francisco. “I’m not requesting anyone go fishing for us, but I’m asking people to teach us how to fish, you know what I’m saying?” Johnson says.

At the same time, Taja’s Coalition is also uniting against the local sheriff’s plans for a new jail. The group doesn’t believe that state “tough-on-crime” solutions are making trans people safer.

Our enduring deference to religion, despite its toxicity and phony explanations for the cosmos, lets it survive

“Yes, it is freedom of speech, but,” said Inna Shevchenko, the 24-year-old leader of the topless, fiercely atheist activist group Femen in France. On Feb. 14 she was addressing the conference on art, blasphemy and freedom of expression held at the Krudttønden, a café and cultural center in Copenhagen. She continued. “Why do we still say ‘but’ when we…”

A sustained barrage of automatic gunfire interrupted her. She, the Swedish cartoonist with her onstage, Lars Vilks (famous for his 2007 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked deadly riots in the Islamic world), and much of the audience hurled themselves to the floor before escaping through the building’s rear exit. The hooded terrorist assailant, a 22-year-old Danish citizen of Arab descent, ended up killing a Danish filmmaker, Finn Noergaard, and wounding five others. Police later felled the assassin after he had opened fire on a synagogue, murdering one.

The morning after the Copenhagen assault I spoke with Shevchenko by Skype. Still in the Danish capital, she had spent much of the night at the police station, and had slept poorly after returning to her hotel. Yet she was calm and lucid, determined to continue with Femen’s fight against religion. This fight had turned extremely personal for her even before Copenhagen: She lost 12 friends in the Charlie Hebdo massacre last month in Paris, where she lives as a political refugee. (Femen had figured prominently on the satirical magazine’s pages and had even guest-edited an issue.) Had the Krudttønden organizers held the conference in the café’s front room (with its large windows), and not in the walled-off rear auditorium, she told me, she might not be alive today.

“What were you going to say just before the shooting began?”

“I was going to say that we can’t begin self-censoring, or we end up with just the illusion of free speech. If we have free speech only up to where we might hurt someone’s feelings, then it isn’t free. ‘You have freedom of speech, just don’t offend,’ people tell me. Those who say this are only trying to shut down our freedoms. If we cede to this, we play their game. Now that offends me.”

A perfect illustration of how gender is constructed and indoctrinated. Maybe it is time to stop with all the gender and gender identity nonsense and start referring to that sense of self that tells us we are male or female, women or men as core sex identity instead of gender identity.

Gender roles differ with time and cultures. The sense of self as male or female transcends cultures and eras.

Come with me. Let’s open the door to a parallel universe. You unlock this door with a key of imagination, just like on The Twilight Zone. Here in this parallel world, the rules are different because gender roles are flipped. Loving parents and teachers accept this strange culture as if it’s not so bad, or perhaps even good. As if the reverse of this culture could exist only in the minds of fiction writers or lunatics.

As we travel together, let’s observe the childhood of one baby boy, born into this alternate reality, as seen through the eyes of his mother:

In the womb: It is your baby shower, and everyone has known for several months that you are having a boy. It’s so wonderful after having had a girl first to finally be having a precious little boy. You receive carefully chosen baby gifts that celebrate your son’s gender. Everyone’s favorite item is a tiny white onesie with powder blue lettering that says Future Trophy Husband. You think for a fleeting moment that this is a bit odd, even inappropriate, but all of your friends think it’s super cute. You guess that it is.

Birth: He has finally arrived and you name him Logan! He is healthy and rosy-cheeked and weighs almost 9 pounds. When it is time to take him home, you say goodbye to the skilled and compassionate nurses who took such good care of you both, and one of them tells you, “He is so gorgeous. I bet he’ll be a model one day.”

Age 1: Happy first birthday to Logan! You keep the party small and inexpensive — mostly family and a couple of friends. Grandma brings a cake from the supermarket. It is covered in blue icing, has a crown on top, and says, “For the Birthday Prince.”

Age 2: Christmas this year involves lots of presents and Logan loves the wrapping paper and ribbons more than the toys inside, like most toddlers. He receives so many wonderful gifts. There is a set of musical instruments, all pale blue. There is a special box of boy Lincoln Logs made of blue plastic. There is a little blue T-shirt that says, “I’m too handsome to read books, so my sister reads them for me.” He can’t read yet and doesn’t understand that slogan, but the adults all laugh, so he laughs, too.

Today’s GOP is a kind of bizarro world where ambitious politicians are forced to pledge allegiance to experts who have gotten just about everything wrong. So writes Paul Krugman in his column Friday, who laments the fact that “charlatans and cranks” have gained increasing favor in the party, despite, or maybe even because of, the fact that they get things wrong, and then, by golly, stick to their guns.

This being Krugman, the topic is economics, specifically “supply-siders,” a group which even N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor at Harvard who served for a time as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, made fun of when their belief that tax cuts would provide a magical elixir to the economy and miraculously fix deficits proved so very wrong. But the fact that even a Republican adviser said this approach is bunk has had absolutely no effect on the party’s thinking. Proof: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, spoke at a dinner at Manhattan’s “21” Club this week. It was “hosted by the three most prominent supply-siders: Art Laffer (he of the curve); Larry Kudlow of CNBC; and Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. Politico pointed out that Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, attended a similar event last month. Clearly, to be a Republican contender you have to court the powerful charlatan caucus,” Krugman writes.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Krugman adds: “A doctrine that even Republican economists consider dangerous nonsense has become party orthodoxy. And what makes this political triumph especially remarkable is that it comes just as the doctrine’s high priests have been setting new standards for utter, epic predictive failure.”

It is not merely that the supply-siders did not see the economic crisis coming, although they didn’t. Then again, lots of economists failed to see it, so Krugman gives them a mild pass on that. It’s the “post-crisis” developments that have been even more telling. “The people Mr. Walker was courting have spent years warning about the wrong things,” Krugman writes. “‘Get ready for inflation and higher interest rates’ was the title of a June 2009 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal by Mr. Laffer; what followed were the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history. Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Moore both predicted 1970s-style stagflation.”